


how cas would be if dean died

by cirque_de_reves (orphan_account)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Destiel - Freeform, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-08
Updated: 2017-03-08
Packaged: 2018-09-30 22:27:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10173791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/cirque_de_reves
Summary: exactly what the title says.): I am sorry for this





	

**Author's Note:**

> this is probably kind of confusing. it's probably helpful if you remember throughout this that the plot is essentially that dean is dead, and cas turns into this depressed alcoholic hermit as a result.  
> (another little note: I realize this is a bit controversial - what with cas supposedly not being able to live without dean - but think about it. the Winchester brothers themselves have the same complex. when one of them dies the other either can't bear life without the brotherly presence, or they're too scared to face the fact that they'll have to)  
> thank u!! I know not a lot of people read this, but I wouldn't be posting this on a website at all if I didn't want people to have reactions to it. so say what you will (in the comments, i mean), if you can and you want! I'm kind of proud of this, but only because it took me a while to write. everything else might be kind of weird or sloppy or something, I didn't spend too long editing it.  
> enjoy !<3

The alcohol wobbles in Cas's unsteady hand, teetering away from his numb fingertips, dribbling from the kaleidoscopic glass onto the scratchy floorboards like the saliva down his chin. He doesn't waste time - though he has all the time in the world, that's what makes it so god _damn_ painful - sponging it away with his tattered sleeve, which is already sullied with mucus anyway. He's numb. Everything is numb.

Everything except his nostrils and sense of smell: the acrid odor of booze penetrates his skull in shallow blasts, like a skeletal, belligerent woodpecker, like a needling caricature of his old self, slightly carbonated and the anemic color of old Skittles.

He swirls the remaining liquid, rolling his wrist, and watches it as it continues to oscillate even after he's stilled his hand. Cas holds his breath and pretends he's drowning in it, that instead of the reverse the liquor is swallowing  _him_ , kidnapping him in the eye of its tawny whirlpool and washing over him, diluting him, until he ceases to be anything larger or anything more capable of pathos than a molecule of ethanol himself.

What a fantasy...

 _Must be a fantasy, he thinks. The same way buried treasure is fantasy, and bees never going extinct is fantasy, and feudal caricatures of calligraphed Once-Upon-a-Times and princesses with golden milkmaid braids are all fantasy. Must be the warped and cottony daydreams of fanaticism...Must be, because the way Dean Winchester looks at him- like he's his sun - is some reincarnation of that medieval Happily-Ever-After, all lush-green-dandelions, wheatgrass-up-to-your-hips, dangling-willow-leaves nostalgia; something Cas's promiscuous imagination would've come up with if he had ever had the time or place to think outside of God like that. Which is why he's so convinced that it isn't real, that the complete history of anthropology isn't laying right here in front of him in the man's eyes._ _The air is so annoyingly electric that Cas considers ushering it out of the way completely, but no. He wants this human to be safe, and happy, and okay. He gets this weird deja-vu feeling that they've met before, the Righteous Man and himself, but he's sure he would've held on to the memory for the rest of his infinite days._

_It's getting late, and his mission is still unfulfilled, and though Dean's eyes shine like lighthouses even in the pitch of Hell, they still bore into the angel with a simultaneous side effect of a tumultuous need to help him. Shaking out his wings (they feel like fire down here, is all) he grips the man tightly by his upper left bicep and sails upward from perdition._

_When they breach the crust of the Earth, the human is rendered unconscious, but all this does for Cas is make it easier to kiss the top of his head impulsively once it's time to lock him back in the wooden box. Only a few feet underground now, thank Heaven; but the Winchester is designated to do the rest on his own, so before he brings him to the wakefulness required to do the job and flutters away Castiel tangles their fingers together, and whispers something to him that Dean'll never remember and Cas'll never forget._

_"We'll meet again soon; it's unpreventable," he says softly. "Haven't you ever heard of love at first sight?"_

Cas chokes pathetically into his beverage, his grasp on it slackening with balmy perspiration as it crashes into the ocean of wooden splinters beneath him, riving into smithereens across the ochre, and then it's carried away by the tide.

His vision is swimming.

He tries futilely to scrape up the shards, tentatively bending backward and straining his calloused fingertips towards them, but they break his skin and he jerks back into himself, left only with shame and beads of blood pooling in the undulating crevices that make up his fingerprints. Burying his face in his hands, he slumps over the table, focusing on the grind of its corners marring his ribs, and reaches within him for a sob or tears or  _something_ that will keep this hollowness from smothering him. 

_"Dean, I gave up everything for you," Cas pleads. He's in such a mindset of survival that his tear ducts are completely dry and arid like deserts; he almost wishes something would come out of them, fucking blood even, so that he could at least have something between him and eye contact with Dean. "Everything. For...us."_

_Dean winces, and it's obvious what his intentions are before he even starts talking. "Cas, I don't...I can't love you like that. I can't afford to. Look around me, you see a lot of friends, a lot of family? It's just you and me and Sammy, because I've managed to get rid of everyone else we ever cared about. I loved 'em, you know? And now they're all either gallows-men in Hell or sitting empty in Heaven, waiting to die for the second time so they can just get it the fuck over with. I did that to them. The only place worth being is the middle-ground, this fucking blue marble we live on, because at least we have a solid purpose, and I kicked 'em out without even trying to. I'm poison..."_

_"Dean..."_

_"I'm poison, and there ain't nothing you can do about it, and if it were to get in the way even more than it already has - I dunno, Cas, I wouldn't be able to stand myself. Losing you...I can't say. I think I'd just...I'd lose myself, too."_

_Cas brings his shoulders forward and blinks his eyes into focus. "You can't just push me away because you think that doesn't affect me too, Dean! And what you said, about the others, it only goes to show how short life is, and how we could lose it at any given instant. And if you don't think that's enough of a reason, then - then you're clearly mistaken -"_

_Dean pulls the angel to him until they're flush against each other; their lips don't touch, even though they have before, but all the same it's such an explosion of relief that Cas staggers back, his knees giving out, taking Dean with him as they tumble to the ground, and they use the same warm breath to chuckle into each other without smiling, but still, with alleviation._

_"Yeah, Cas," Dean exhales into the seraph's shoulder. "Clearly, I am..."_

"Castiel?"

The angel turns his head at the familiarity of dialogue, hoping that it's  _someone_ but not hoping too hard because the someone he hopes for has long since taken his reason to because he's dead. Gone. A gallows-man in hell, or sitting empty in Heaven. The more Cas thinks it the more Cas wants to die, too.

"Hannah?" If it's not the angel, it's her vessel; she looks just the same as always, smile lines shining around her eyes and her short brown hair waving lustrously even though the summer air is humid and tepid, like a swamp, or quicksand.

Now, her smile lines - what Cas always knew her for, she always had the most cordial smile - wrinkle up and shrink into her face, disgust branding her cheeks.

Yes, it's Hannah. "Look at you, Castiel," she says, and he doesn't know how she got here or how she found him but the way she's looking at him makes him feel pitied and spiteful - "Look at this mess...what have you done? You're completely inebriated, Castiel, you need to be cleansed of this, of  _him-_ " she says the pronoun like it's a dirty word, like God Himself forbade its utterance. 

He stands up to defend Dean, and as he does it he overturns the table, and he can't tolerate any more of him  _wrecking_ things, so he just cries.

He stands in front of her, weeping into his palms, and he doesn't care.

Hannah speaks again, and this time it's obvious that she regrets this whole ordeal; but when the words come out of her mouth they are sad for Castiel, not for herself.

"I'm so sorry, brother," She steps towards him and awkwardly snakes a hand around his waist, trying to comfort him, but she'll never even  _taste_ how he feels. "Do you want me to...?"

She says those words with nothing else to specify or contextualize them, but he understands immediately what she means.

He senses the potential energy that they co-create in the room; Hannah, with her flourishing, brilliant grace, and Cas himself, with his broken heart and his broken wings and his blue eyes that have long since sunk into his head, rimmed by saltwater and thin, bloodshot flesh.  

With no other choice, he takes her hand and scanning the room panoramically one last time he waves goodbye to nothing. What is left behind will stay left behind.

_Dean used to look at Cas like he was his sun and now Cas wants to tell him that his sun is dying - a sparkling nebula combusting into a million shards of space-junk that rain onto the horizon like meteors._

Cas closes his eyes so he doesn't see it coming, and Hannah does it with much more ease than he had expected. But, she kills him quickly at least, plunging the angel blade into his spine and twisting it for effiency. For a moment it's like he's being electrocuted, but the sensation is a relief.

He'd take this over not having Dean any day of the week.

As he falls to the floor, his wings become ash and surround him in a vapor, little feather-embers that disappear on the outskirts of his vision. His sight fades from the inside out, and out of his peripheral vision, he can almost see his man.

His last words out loud are a crippled _thank you_ addressed to Hannah, but the last words he thinks are _we'll meet again soon, darling, it's unpreventable._

_Haven't you ever heard of true love?_

 


End file.
